Dialogue with Wu Xiaobo: My memory with the city of Hangzhou

Wu Xiaobo, a financial writer, founder of “890 New Business Studies” and “Blue Lion Publishing”, lives in Hangzhou. His authored and published works such as The Great Failure (I and II), Thirty Years of Turbulence, Ten Years of Turbulence, Big Fish in Water, Successes and Losses of Economic Reforms in Past Dynasties, and Tencent Biography are among the best-sellers. His work was twice selected as one of the top ten books of the year by Asia Weekly.

You are one of the best financial writers in China. You grew up, worked and lived in Hangzhou. Is there any inherent connection between the city of Hangzhou and your writing career?

“Best” is not acceptable. In 1990, after graduating from university, I returned to Hangzhou and was assigned to the Zhejiang branch of Xinhua News Agency, where I joined the industry and commerce group. I believe that the power of business and technology will dominate the world of the future, and I should be with this change.

Therefore, my career has inevitably intersected with the business figures of the city, looking back on the past, such as yesterday:

The streets of Hangzhou in the 1980s

In a certain year, the city government notified Feng Gensheng to take the exam. In his opinion, entrepreneurs were all typed out, so he refused to take the exam. He put down the phone here, and found me and a reporter from Zhejiang Daily there. We wrote this incident into a report, and for a while, “Feng Gensheng quit the exam” became a national topic.

The AD calcium milk produced by Hangzhou Wahaha Group is a childhood memory of the post-90s generation

Once, I went to Chengdong to interview a school-run enterprise called “Wahaha”. It is said that it has become the largest children’s nutritional solution enterprise in the country within three years. Wahaha sent a car to pick me up. It was an old Lada made in the Soviet Union. The first thing the person who picked me up said was: “Please hold the door. It’s not very secure. The car might open halfway through.”

These experiences formed part of my long career as a journalist. It can be said that since the 1990s, the “Shan Jia” Hangzhou people have been resurrected. Feng Gensheng and Zong Qinghou made Hangzhou a national beverage and health care product brand center. At the same time, in the field of home appliances, refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, TV sets and mobile phones have all emerged from the top ten brands in the country.

All of this is a process of savage growth. The city is never static, eternal and perfect, it is always self-forming, full of vitality and contingency – it even has the properties of life. The previous changes in Hangzhou are not necessarily related to me, but every choice I make is more or less influenced by it. 

I sometimes think that perhaps the stories of Feng Gensheng, Zong Qinghou, Ma Yun, Ding Lei, and Li Shufu, and the development process of Hangzhou’s new business landscape, are the most vivid Chinese-style cases. It lacks top-level design and is co-founded and implemented by a group of entrepreneurs with no business school education.

Their thirst for wealth and flexible business instincts are greatly stimulated in an era of explosive growth in demand. In this way, the glory and dream of a city will be continuously interpreted, and a commercial culture with regional and era characteristics will be born. It is attracting participants and bystanders, and each intervening bystander is giving it a diachronic connotation. At that moment, I discovered that the walking figure had become a financial writer.

What kind of thinking and opportunity made you decide on this book Hangzhou on Earth: Me and a City Memories?

I came to this city when I was 13, it was 1981. After four years of college in Shanghai, I returned to the city again and never left. I have lived in this city for forty years. Familiarity is the biggest enemy of getting along. I must discover new strangeness.

Susan Sontag once said something interesting: “Nostalgia itself becomes the object of nostalgia, the recollection of a feeling that is difficult to retrieve, the object of the feeling.” It occurred to me that I wrote Perhaps the mood in this book is really not too different from when Zhang Dai wrote Dream of the West Lake. We are all recording Hangzhou and the West Lake that we are willing to record. It is full of illusions, but it is actually far from the truth.

So, writing this book is a lovely and inconsequential thing. I take it as a thought, you can take it as a person’s private memory of the city.

I’m not the first to tell about Hangzhou, and I certainly won’t be the last. In this Chinese city, which is famous for its comfort and beautiful scenery, countless people have lived long or short lives, and the memories of those sorrows and joys slowly disappear with their souls, as if they never existed. This time, some of them were reluctantly awakened by me and then locked into the meaning I gave them. One day in the future, I will meet the same fate as them.

Please introduce the content of Hangzhou on Earth.

From the birth of Liangzhu civilization 5,000 years ago, to the “dirty, chaotic and endless” canals that brought wealth, from the “naive and straight” Bai Juyi to overcome all the opinions, build the white embankment, to the “self-proclaimed former life” “Hangzhou native” Su Dongpo wrote more than 450 poems for Hangzhou and the West Lake, from the night of Hu Xueyan’s defeat to the resurrection of the good men represented by Zong Qinghou and Feng Gensheng in the 1990s. In the process of writing, I have been trying to capture the “city character” of Hangzhou, what is its underlying cultural genes, and how it has been formed into today’s appearance under the layered experience of history.

In the process of sorting out Hangzhou’s history and culture, did you study Hangzhou as an enterprise? How do you do it?

Compared with enterprises, Hangzhou is too rich. Of course, the process of writing Hangzhou’s history and culture is somewhat habitual to some financial observers. I can talk about it from the perspective of “details” and “data”.

When I was a journalism student in college, I believed that the details constituted the whole truth, and I would spend my life pursuing the truth of the details as my career. So in this book, I document some interesting details.

For example, my original residence was in Jinzhu Road, and the name of this road is related to two souls. In 1130, when the Jin army entered Lin’an, there were military and civilian resistance in the city, led by two junior lieutenants named Jin Sheng and Zhu Wei. To commemorate them, the people of Hangzhou built a temple of righteous men, which has long since disappeared. A road name was left. On the north side of Jinzhu Road, there is an equally narrow alley called Machang Road. It was the place where Qian Liu raised military horses in Wuyue Kingdom. In the Southern Song Dynasty, it was a lively flower market. There is a very famous soul who lived here for more than 20 years, her name is Li Qingzhao. It is about ten miles from Machang Road to West Lake, but the female poet has never written a poem related to West Lake. History and reality meet silently, and every detail has a different color.

△Machang Road, Hangzhou, where Li Qingzhao lived for more than 20 years.

△ Portrait of Li Qingzhao

After more than three decades of business research, I have to admit that I have only discovered half the truth, and the data is the last truth compared to the details.

Data has a more powerful abstraction than details. In the process of writing this book, I also occasionally speak numbers instead of words. For example, since the Sui and Tang dynasties opened up the department and recruited scholars, in more than a thousand years, Suzhou Prefecture has produced 50 champions, while Hangzhou Prefecture has only 15; at its peak, Lin’an City had a permanent population of about 1.24 million, making it the largest city in the world. Venice, the largest commercial city in Europe at that time, had a population of only 100,000; in Marco Polo’s Travels, Hangzhou’s length exceeds that of Beijing, accounting for about one-fifteenth of the book; Xixingdu has a history of 2,500 years. It used to be the starting point of the East Zhejiang Canal. It used to be very busy. Today, the ancient town of Xixing is 4 kilometers away from the river…

If you’re smart enough to combine numbers with details, it’s possible to spot all the emotions of the moment: happiness, sadness, anxiety, anger, and indifference.

Many years later, there may be a writer like me trying to know the joys, sorrows and joys of Hangzhou people in the early 21st century. In addition to reading historical records and Human Hangzhou, they should also find some “data” about Hangzhou. . It will silently pour out what the city has yet to decipher, and what they mean.

How to understand what you said in the book “Hangzhou itself is a huge museum”? What do you think is the most significant urban character or cultural gene of Hangzhou?

I was once asked a question: why don’t you have a great museum? The collections in Zhejiang or Hangzhou museums are completely incomparable to ancient cities such as Xi’an, Nanjing, Luoyang and Taiyuan.

I thought about it for a long time, and then I realized it. Hangzhou magnifies the whole city into a museum. There is no way you can move the plum blossoms written by Feilaifeng or Lin Hejing into a museum, and there is no need to build a museum for the tens of thousands of poems chanting the West Lake. The broken bridge is actually an abstract emotion, and the tea from Longjing is still in your ceramic cup. Smoke was coming from inside, and the silk umbrella hit a little girl’s head. The reason Hangzhou is not museumized is that its culture is more presented as landscapes, words, legends and commodities, all of which are still alive and are still part of everyday life today.

I thought about it for a long time, and then I realized it. Hangzhou magnifies the whole city into a museum. There is no way you can move the plum blossoms written by Feilaifeng or Lin Hejing into a museum, and there is no need to build a museum for the tens of thousands of poems chanting the West Lake. The broken bridge is actually an abstract emotion, and the tea from Longjing is still in your ceramic cup. Smoke was coming from inside, and the silk umbrella hit a little girl’s head. The reason Hangzhou is not museumized is that its culture is more presented as landscapes, words, legends and commodities, all of which are still alive and are still part of everyday life today.

Portrait of Song Huizong

The formation of Hangzhou’s urban character is a process that is both concrete and abstract. Like the body and soul of life, it presents its own unique connotation and representation under the arrangement of various encounters and fate.

This city has never produced a profound philosopher, a suffering poet or a tragic novelist. More than a thousand years ago, some people used “floating birth” to describe it. It is not ruined enough, there is no mournful history of massacres. “Partial peace” is its destiny, and it also dramatically constitutes the city’s personality. Here, there are loyal ministers but no fierce generals, literati but no philosophers, merchants and no gamblers, no Zen practitioners but ascetic monks, and even an occasional emperor, but they lack the ambition to compete in the Central Plains.

This is a city without a personality of rejection, it is surrounded by beauty, and it has always fallen into it. The people here are not aggressive enough to do anything and like to make way for themselves.

Now that I think about it, the reason is very simple. There is a Lingyin and West Lake in the back road of their house. The former can entrust the soul, and the latter is enough to settle the body. For Hangzhou people, there is only one philosophical question, which is – how to live well? This is Hangzhou’s urban philosophy, which lacks grandeur, is trivial, concrete and secular.

Its resistance to time and power is mild, even in the most desperate moments, still in the style of Li Qingzhao and Zhang Dai. This is doomed that Hangzhou is not a sacred or tragic city, it is ordinary, slightly melancholy but not decadent. There are many fierce and turbulent souls buried in the lakeside and mountains of Hangzhou. Most of them were not born in Hangzhou, and they finally choose to rest here. Perhaps this is in line with their last imagination of the world.

What is the difference between Hangzhou people and Shanghai people, and people from other places in Zhejiang?

Since more than a thousand years ago, Hangzhou has always been a consumer-oriented city belonging to the emerging middle class. The beautiful natural scenery, complex human history and commercial prosperity are seamlessly integrated. Here, it only takes effort to get close to any beautiful thing, it is like duckweed on the lake, superficially floating on the surface of life, just like life itself.

An anonymous hand scroll of Four Seasons Customs of Hangzhou in the Qing Dynasty (part)

Like all Hangzhou people in the past, people today are also looking for a path in their dreams, driven by desire to run forward. They make money, have fun, and still don’t like to discuss big issues. They meet the person they love, linger or separate from it. Their hearts were softened by the wind from the West Lake, and even the curves of their speech and appearance became softer. If they want to have a child, they will also go to Shangtianzhu to burn incense. On the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, they will go to Yongfu Temple or Jingci Temple to line up for a laba porridge. There are also many girls who meet on weekends and go to the mountains near Yunqi to release some animals. Turtles and Loaches…

△ Around 1930, the West Lake and Hangzhou City can be seen from Geling.

△In 2021, the West Lake and Hangzhou City can be seen from the Gem Mountain.

They cursed the rising house prices, and once they had children, they would have to worry about going to a good kindergarten for a while. While they are proud of their company, they complain about “996” on social networks. There are always people like Zong Qinghou around them. Yesterday, they were selling popsicles and clothing at your doorstep. After a few years, they became the richest man and a super “Internet celebrity”, which makes them both envious and anxious. For more than a thousand years, the city has been entangled with money.

They become part of Hangzhou in the sense of time and material. No matter where they come from, they are willing to tell others that he is actually a “Hangzhou guy”. For many of them, including me, Hangzhou might be the best world in the world.

What else do you want to talk about about Hangzhou?

If the writing of this book is regarded as a time frame, just like the past history, it may remain for a long time, or it may soon become a memory that will never be repeated.

Each generation of Hangzhou people has its own clothing, mantras and places to hang around. They are all life itself, vivid and fragile, not necessarily related to eternity. Some parts cannot be recorded in detail, but they are equally important: the transformation of urban order by political and social institutions, the iteration of life and cultural patterns by technological tools, and the anxiety and restlessness hidden behind smiles.

“Like a river, we have been diverted by the strong era again and again”, we are just like the city, we are involuntarily trying to make ourselves better.